Dealing with Lag - Help!

[Gwydion]

For some reason, I experience some brutal lag at the most crucial times.  It's usually when I'm engaged in combat but the intensity of it is sporadic.  It happens sometimes walking around on the zig, but its usually during combat.

There are times when it seems everything "freezes", and then I know I'm in trouble.  It can last 10-15 seconds at times.  Everything then seems to instantly fast forward with a long string of damage numbers trickling quickly above the head of my PC.

Thank goodness for party members healing my boy, but it's going to catch up to me and drive me nuts when he gets fugued from it.   I don't mind dying, but being able to do absolutely nothing to prevent it just sucks.

Have a fairly new Hewlett Packard computer and what I thought was a pretty decent game card.

My wife uses her laptop quite a bit while I'm playing and we're on the same high-speed modem.  Could it be from her downloading a video or something while I'm playing at the same time?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[Anonymous Bosch]

I have the same problem with other people selfishly wanting to use the internet while I'm playing games.  The solution is to ask your wife not to use so much internet.

[Howlando]

It is latency caused by your connection to the server being clogged up, or is it a technical issue in which your FPS drops and your whole NWN client feels sluggish?

[Egon the Monkey]

WHa is she DLing from? Regardless of the speed, Bittorrent is notoriously laggy compared to a direct connection as it connects to a lot of other machines at once. I tend to set any download managers I have to run overnight using their scheduler option. You can set times when it will not download, and times it will, so you can set up what you want and run it when it's convenient. Also, check there's nothing running on your machine. I had bad lag all this week until I noticed I had other programs running minimised.

You can see if it's a problem on your machine by having a play through a single-player module for a couple of hours and seeing if you encounter the same issues.

Best ways to keep lag down are turning the minimap off and going into the NWN graphics settings and turning them down.

[Gwydion]

Howland, how can I check these things?  BTW, my computer is a desktop and is wired in, my wife's laptop is wireless.  

Thanks all, Good stuff!


Gwydion's plan of attack:

1.  Play some NWN on single player.

2.  Play EFU when wife is not on laptop.

3.  Make sure download managers, security scans, etc. are not running while I play.

4.  Try and figure out what Howland is talking about.

[Porkolt]

5. Modify your modem settings so your wife can only open a certain (low) maximum number of connections and/or to limit her maximum down- and upload speeds.
 
 
 
She'll never notice you're the one responsible, but will just complain about the slowness of the internet.
 
And when she asks 'is your internet slow?' you say 'no, it's fine, it must be your PC'.

[Anonymous Bosch]

5. Modify your modem settings so your wife can only open a certain (low) maximum number of connections and/or to limit her maximum down- and upload speeds.
 
 
 
She'll never notice you're the one responsible, but will just complain about the slowness of the internet.
 
And when she asks 'is your internet slow?' you say 'no, it's fine, it must be your PC'.

Evil genius.

[colorox]

Are you behind a cable modem or dial up (sigh)? Have you called your provider to run a line test? I struggled with Time Warner for about four weeks before I just got feed up with them and exchanged cable modem (ask Oisin he was on most of the time I was complaining about it), cause I could tell the modem was going out due to consistently loosing internet connectivity but Time Warner was for sure there was nothing wrong.

I can stream movies to multiple devices, eg, WII and Computer, and game  at the same time with no latency most of the time and my boys are playing xbox live all at the same time.

However, there are  certain spawn events that scare me, and one for example is the Horse  that spawns in the Templar quest, that has bounced me from the mod and I get major lag when he spawns. I have learned to stay clear of where he spawns.

Also, I have been bounced when a Bard sings and a cleric casts turn, at  the same time, notice the timing has to be impeccable for this to  happen, could be just coincidental.

There are certain areas in walking that I know, my client will skip/lag regardless of what is happening, for instance, when I log in at the  Ziggurat inn, and at the point that I enter the main hall with the  fireplace, my client skips, every time. When I log in and exit  fellhammer hold and right as my toon starts going down the hills my  client will skip every time, regardless of what is going on behind my  modem.

What I have learned when hard core lag sits in, be very patient and do not multi-click...

Post your computer specs so we can get a better gage on making  recommendations? This game is old, if you have a new computer, you  should not have any problems, hardware wise, I think.

I think you can check your FPS by hitting the ~ key to pull up the admin console in the top left corner you will see a flashing _ just type "fps" and i think you can get a pic of how many frames per second you are getting, bigger = better, as they say.

Read through this link, you might find some useful information:

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=252714&forum=49

[Gwydion]

Awesome stuff.

I'm going to go through that link to Bioware and try all those things to cover all my bases.

Thanks!

[The Beggar]

Didn't read through all of the above, so if I spew re-iterations, sorry.

Check for any recent updates to graphics card drivers, the NWN graphics can cause problems with some of them that mimic lag, and usually are during "key" parts of PvP or quests where bosses cast spells. For example: I still can stutter quite a bit when walking near certain visual effects (the lightning effect of the mythallar near the Dominion sending guy).

If you have updated, try rolling it back to a previous one. That can help.